Life After
by YFate
Summary: Deidara had been ready, willing, to die for his art. But someone interfered. A Deidara “what-if” one-shot, no particular pairings.


Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters, etc., of Naruto. This story is for entertainment purposes only, and not for profit.

_A/N: I just couldn't leave the idea alone. Any inaccuracies are entirely from my own ignorance - or willful deliberation, LOL. I'm still exploring the Naruverse, especially Shippuden. Yummy. (Fate)_

WARNING! SHIPPUDEN AND MANGA SPOILERS! CURSING, DARK IMARGERY AND ADULT THEMES, OVER-DESCRIPTION AND RUN-ON SENTENCES

**Life After**

What he remembered was elation. Elation so great it _burned,_ right through his very being. _This _was what he had always lived for, always aspired to! To become one with art in a way that even Master Sasori could not, for all the puppet-master's turning himself into one of his stringed effigies to eternal beauty. But true art was to be experienced, and for the world to experience his masterpiece---that was all he could ask for. Even better was to be the kernel, the spark, that would leap him into the most furious spectacle of blossoming light and fusion the world had ever seen. His greatest work, his life's work---literally, for his life would be sacrificed in the making of it---oh, but it was everything he had ever _dreamed!_

Except the pain. The pain was enormous. But it, too, was but a small price to pay to take that smug Uchiha with him. He would prove to that red-eyed bastard that _nothing_ could withstand the greatness of his creativity, the utter transient beauty of his art!

And so he gave himself up to it, until his very skin stretched thin over the glorious sun that he was feeding with his essence. He welcomed the darkness, the escape, believing there was no life after. Just this final, utterly unbelievable moment when he would consume the world and the world would consume him in a last, great, spectacular implosion of stunning beauty and fire.

But it didn't. For even as he felt his essence, soul, mind---whatever one called that awareness of self---slip free just a single instant before the glorious light engulfed him, something grabbed ahold of him, dragging him back from it. He screamed---silently, for no words formed, and he had no voice to form them even if he could---in angry denial and frustration. He'd been so _ready_ for that end, but something was tearing him away. He struggled in vain, for the thing had him bound in the blue energies of immense chakra. He saw a swirled mask surrounding a glowing red eye that reminded him of his tormentors---Itachi, Sasuke, all the other superior bastards who had ever mocked him, were always mocking him. Gods, how he hated them, loathed them, the smug bastards. He would kill them, hurt them, make them hurt as they had hurt him..._damn you all to hell!_

And then awareness faded, rage and anger and hurt and denial drowning into the darkness, and he knew no more.

ooOOOoo

When next he woke, he could not move. And the pain---the pain was unbearable, but it was a strange torture, like thousands of senbon stuck all over his skin. Yet there was a deadness to his limbs, as if they were not really there for him to use. It felt as if the very blood in his veins was trying to thrust its way through his body for the first time, mapping the pathways to bring life to his limbs and lungs and heart by sheer force. Each nerve felt like it was stretching out to test new sensations never experienced before. The overwhelming messages sent from each tiny little neuron imprinted itself across his brain in lines of fire, coming so quick and incessantly that he shuddered from the pure overload.

That shudder sent such horrible vibrations seething throughout his body that he opened his mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. He convulsed, knotting and unknotting himself around the unendurable agony. His eyes bulged, and he was suddenly confronted by a spinning pumpkin, the hypnotic swirl burning around a glowing red center. It drew him in against his will, for he knew what that evil red light within the swirling black patterns was..._Sharingan. _

_'NO!' _He'd spent so much time fighting against it, he could not let it pull him in again. But he could not look away, and he was suddenly caught---

And all was quiet darkness. The pain was gone. The air was silent. The terrible sensations burning from the inside out disappeared, and he could suddenly think with a bemused detachment that was wry in the recognition that he was caught up in the Sharingan's genjutsu. His annoyance faded as a shadow emerged from the darkness, solidifying into a lean, black silhouette, the tell-tale orange mask hiding its face.

_'Tobi?'_ Somehow, his surprised thoughts formed into words that the other could understand, though no true sound emerged from lips that shaped the words.

"Deidara-senpai!" The lean figure danced in delight.

_'What happened?'_ he demanded, a dull anger growing inside him. How---how could his choice be taken from him?

"I saved you, senpai!" Tobi eagerly exclaimed, ingeniously clasping his hands. "I had to wait for your soul to leave your body before I could grab it and take it away with me---"

_'You fucking moron---_why? _I was ready, _willing, _to die! Why did you interfere---I'll kill you!' _Deidara lunged, fingers crooked to choke the life from the man who had denied him his greatest dream. Tobi stilled, a red light gleaming behind the single opening amid the swirling lines of his concealing mask, and Deidara abruptly found himself frozen in place, unable to move.

All guilelessness was gone from Tobi's lilting voice, the teasing, eager-to-please buffoonery dispelled beneath a chilling self-possession that he would never have expected from so crazy a source. Deidara, frozen by the power emanating from what he had always considered a masked idiot, suddenly felt fear like he had not since he was a child.

"You should be more grateful, Deidara-senpai. For it was only by my interference that you survived what was, perhaps, the most monumentally stupid act of your entirely young and impetuous life."

_'Who are you?'_ Deidara managed to whisper, forcing it out through gritted teeth and a convulsing throat that tried to choke the words off.

"It's amazing that you can talk at all, senpai, held in the power of my dojutsu. It shows how strong you can be, when you put your stubborn mind to it." Although no expression showed on the seamless orange mask concealing Tobi's face, Deidara got the impression he was smiling. "It's one of the reasons I kept you alive. I still have use for you, Deidara."

The question burned inside his mind, though he could not force the snarl from his lips, for Tobi had tightened his grip.

"Who am I?" The red eye glinted in amusement. "Ah, you will know that soon enough, Deidara-san---as will the world. Suffice to say that it is not yet time for the truth to be revealed. I still have a use for Pein, although his megalomania grows tiresome. It will be his undoing one day."

The mask laughed, a mockery of sound that cut Deidara to the heart. "As your own was almost yours."

The darkness was suddenly blurring, the red light swirling inside the orange mask like a coal igniting into flames. The pain was creeping up again, the pain of his body and his awareness returning to it. The genjutsu was fading. Tobi's voice followed him, almost taunting as he instructed lightly, "Rest, my friend. Recover your strength. You must acquaint yourself with your new body, and it will take time for you to find and replenish your chakra. Be certain that I will call on you again. I still have need of you, senpai. Farewell---for now."

And then the pain engulfed him and his mind drowned inside it until he fainted under the onslaught.

ooOOOoo

Her hands were cool. That was the first sensation he became aware of that was not pain. The coolness of her palms, the gentleness of her touch. They did not linger---his skin was too sensitive for that, his nerves too raw. He did not understand the pain that came to him in undulating waves. Hadn't Tobi said this was a new body? Why should he feel such agony, when it was not his own skin, burned and raw from impending implosion, but the tanned expanse of before? Blemished here and there with long-familiar scars, his skin was still smooth and whole, as if he had never stepped down from his clay bird to engage Uchiha Sasuke in that last battle. It was _his_ body, though, or as alike to it as to confuse him as to why he felt such a stranger in his own skin.

Later, Deidara would understand that it was, and was not, his body. It was an exact duplicate---a replacement clone. Somehow, Tobi had taken his soul on the verge of death when his old body had released it, and brought it to the dimensional territory he ruled with the Sharingan. The masked freak had brought a clay clone along with him when he teleported outside the blast zone of Deidara's suicidal C0 explosion, and somehow managed to attach his soul to the clone.

It was something easy in theory, but incredibly difficult in actuality. Deidara's soul knew the difference, despite his bloodline limit's affiliation for clay, and it rebelled. The clone had to force functions it had never been intended for, and the pain came from the replacement being turned into real flesh as his chakra slowly burned it for his own use. He was as weak as a newborn babe, and had to learn to do everything again, from breathing to walking to not shitting himself. His chakra was consumed by the transformation, and he had no energy to spare for recovery. He had nothing left than to sleep, and when not to sleep, to wander restlessly in fevered dreams, and when not dreaming, to feel the pain of his soul realigning itself to this new vessel.

There were rare moments of lucidity, and the lines sometimes blurred between now and what had happened in the past. He heard humming, an off-key note, and he suddenly saw the old drunk who had shown him how to set the explosive tags to open locks and safes. Stealing the contents for whatever they could get at the sleazy pawnbrokers, the petty larceny brought in a little money to help feed all the street-orphans the old reprobate had taken in. It was a strange family, one who would cut your throat for the pennies in your torn pocket if you let down your guard, even once…

A soft voice, a whispered query, and he was surrounded by the hard women of his earliest childhood. He remembered soft arms, languid voices, the smell of perfume and smoke too sickly-sweet and thick, trying to hide the stench of sweat and stale sex that permeated everything around him. Their laughter; hard, tinkling, mocking---_always the mocking._

He heard the taunts of street-urchins bigger than he, laughing at how small and weak he was. He felt his fists pummel into their soft bellies and hard jaws; felt his nose break again as a huge fist hammered into him. Always squabbling like rats in an alley for a moldy crust, or like starved, beaten dogs fighting over scraps.

_Scraps_---the greedy, old, hawk-nosed madam of the whorehouse had called him "used scraps" after she sold his innocence to a fat man with rotten teeth and oniony breath. Fat, sweaty hands touched him too intimately, causing him fear and then pain, fierce pain as that innocence was stolen. His weak cry was accompanied by mocking laughter and the lurid clink of the few pieces of silver traded for the privilege.

He had always hated silver. Gold was more his color---tawny gold, like his mother's hair. Long, silky hair that covered him like a curtain when she bent her head over his, kissing him softly on the forehead. It was all Deidara could remember of her. That, and a light fragrance, a floral fragrance that was so unlike the heavy musk the other women---whores---drenched themselves with. He had felt safe in her arms, protected. But not for long; she was gone, dead, before he was four or five. And that was all he could remember of her---_how sad, how pathetically sad_. He sneered at that, refusing to pity the stupid, trusting child who had learned too early and yet not soon enough not to trust anyone ever...

He sometimes felt warmth on him, but rather than burning him, it enveloped him in sweet comfort. He welcomed it, for he could somehow sense the golden sunlight pouring all around him. It felt like he was nestled in the pure light of his most brilliant artistic visions. He loved the fire of art, the glowing beauty that he could escape to from the ugliness surrounding him.

He saw the craggy face of his teacher, the only one he had ever hired himself---so selfish of him, sneaking away from his intensive studies at the Ninja Academy to study that which he loved more. The Tsuchikage could never understand why the sculptures fascinated him. But bringing beauty to life with his own palms---palms he had always been derided for, palms that he could now use to smooth over the wet contours, shaping beauty from the ugly amorphia---the awe of that thought, that he _could_ create beauty with his own poor hands, still humbled him.

Even more so now, when he had learned to combine his two loves, ninjutsu and art. They'd demanded he choose one over the other, and he had shown them up by combining both, though they had mocked him for it. Damn conventionalists, always mocking him---he would show them---even that old curmudgeon of a teacher, always squashing his creativity, always insisting that one must keep to the old forms, the tried-and-true, the dusty, fussy, utterly limiting artistic styles.

Uninhibited creative expression was squelched beneath the old tyrant's insistence for traditional accuracy. Deidara could not stand it, could never stand it. Just as the old sculptor could not understand _him_, even as he taught him, and mocked him for his initial work. The old bastard had been the first to die---just as those jeering boys who'd taunted his jutsu and lacking education. Overcome by the brilliance of his art, they had all died, every last one of them, once he'd finally freed himself of the constraints of Iwagakure and a society that had rejected him long before he had ever contemplated rejecting it.

Funny, but it was the Tsuchikage who had found him, insisted he be taken and trained with the other clan-bloods in the art of ninjutsu. Some said it was guilt---the bloodline limit on his hands and chest was somehow related to the old dusty fart. The seal on his chest had caused some start of recognition on the cagey old bastard's face. He'd paled, and then Deidara had found his life abruptly changed from a base existence of starving poverty on the streets for surroundings more posh but still a cage, in the end, to his creative mind.

He'd only traded the mockery of street-bullies for the scorn of clan-heirs, assured of their blood and family and place in the world. He'd hated them all, hated them with a seething rage that knotted in his belly as he bested them the only way he knew how, by being better, faster, stronger in every way possible. Earning the respect of his teachers and the older jounin, they grew concerned for his carelessness, his disdain and detachment from others who had never given him anything he had never had to take for himself. Their stodgy, stuffy inhibitions---that was a cage to his very creativity. He could not stand their fear and disgust any longer, so when he'd used them for all he could, he'd left them. Left them in flames and ruin, never once looking back as he took his life's road alone…

ooOOoo

He once felt a familiar shadow in light, during one of his rare moments of clarity, and knew that Zetsu watched him. Possibly assessing his condition for whoever he now reported to. The freaky cannibal gave him a toothy grin, silently fading into the wall as the old man came in to change his soiled sheets. Deidara still could not control his body's functions, and it embarrassed him. But he was too weak to speak, let alone protest the necessity, so he only turned his eyes away, closing them until sleep overtook him.

Shame burned in him, making him angry at the mocking voices of his past now mocking him inside his head. Shame was an old companion, one he hated and loathed and defied with his stubborn insistence on being and beating the best. He used it to his own advantage, twisting it to fuel the anger that gave him strength and incentive.

Itachi had humiliated him, defeating him easily---too easily---with the Sharnigan, forcing him to join the Akatsuki. An organization he had at first loathed but then came to appreciate, as he was made welcome---or as welcome as any of those fucking psychopaths could. Eventually, the Akatsuki had turned into a strange cage that had given him the freedom to express and expand his art, even giving him a higher purpose if he had cared to take it.

He embraced more the purpose that it gave to his day-to-day existence---the higher aims of Pein for peace and prosperity and all that world-domination bullshit was just so much piss in the wind to _him. _He had no care for others, had never felt the need or desire to. Others had never bothered to try and understand him, so why should he be bothered to do the same? Really, he couldn't even see why anyone would bother.

But Akatsuki had earned what little loyalty he had, just for the freedom and definition it gave him. And how better to define himself than pitting himself against greater and greater foes? Test himself and the unique expression of his art against superior enemies, like the nine-tailed Naruto or that other Uchiha, Sasuke. Itachi's younger brother. Damn, but Deidara could not resist the thought of crossing figurative blades with the empty-eyed bastard.

It was a test, a test to see if he had grown enough to take on Itachi, who had always been his prime target---after Orochimaru, of course, just for his betrayal of Master Sasori. And that arrogant little ass hole Uchiha had taken Orochimaru's death from him. Yet another reason to go after the boy whose spiky hair looked, strangely enough, like a duck's ass.

Sasuke's Sharingan was about to defeat him there at the end, but Deidara had been willing to sacrifice everything to show the world just how strong his dedication to art was. Until Tobi's fucking Sharingan interfered, stealing _that_ from him as well. Damn all the swirly-eyed Uchiha bastards with their glowering crimson orbs…

His dreams turned restless then---nightmares of bleeding flames and laughing shadows swirling psychedelic fans around him as he felt the burn reach up inside him to the point where he burst---and then the darkness took him, and this time he slept, and healed.

ooOOoo

There were three of them. Gaolers, nannies, nurses, whatever else he cared to call them. Although only two really tended him. The old man, and his daughter---the woman with the cool, gentle hands. She also had weary eyes. She had seen too much of the world, and it was written all over her young-old face. She was thirty, maybe, but bent from work, as was her father, who was bent with the burden of age and bad joints, his eyes so sunken in his wrinkled face as to be but two bright beads.

Deidara did not know why he was so taken with their eyes. Normally, he never bothered to look into other people's eyes. Windows to too much knowledge, in his opinion, of others that he could care less about. Perhaps it was because there was so damn little to distract him in those few moments when he was lucid enough to stare about him.

There was certainly nothing remarkable about either person. Rather bland and boring, actually. Nothing ascetic or extraordinary---save the ugliness of the old man's wrinkled face, which had spent too much time exposed to sun and weather. They were exactly what they seemed---simple peasants; he too old to work, she working too hard to make up for the lack of a husband or son to shoulder the burden of their poverty. The farm was isolated, the fields overgrown but the garden lush, the few milch-cattle and dirty chickens they kept enough to trade for what they needed.

She was a lousy cook---though it could have been the pap they fed him. Made from milk and rice, it was food given to the youngest babes and the feeblest old farts, those whose bellies were too weak to stomach anything else. As his strength improved, his diet grew to include the best vegetables from their garden, the choicest cuts of meat when it was rarely available. Rice---gods, he was sick of rice and milk and soggy vegetables mixed in stewed broth. Poor fare for one who had grown used to better, but a feast for the half-starved street brat he had once been.

Theirs was a pitiful, typical tale, and one he would not have bothered learning if the little girl, the daughter's daughter, the old man's granddaughter, had not nattered on about it. _She,_ he could never get to shut up. Annoying little chatterbox, always gaily going on, though he never answered or acknowledged her. A little scrap of nothing, dark-haired and bright-eyed, with nothing remarkable but the tongue that constantly flapped inside her too-wide mouth.

She was excited to have an unwilling ear at her disposal, and she went blithely on and on, describing the most inane, boring things. How she had found a pretty stone in the field---one she showed him, and one he grudgingly had to admit had a nice swirl of red across its sandy surface. How the bell-cow had gone in one direction while she had gone in another, or some such shit. How the evil chicken who always pecked her had finally fallen over dead, frightened by a storm---that was the first meat he got, and the skinny, evil bird actually made a tasty soup. Gods, her stupid chatter was enough to make him scream, if he'd had any voice yet to scream with.

But he was bored, and she was free with her time and her high, piping, annoyingly constant babble, and eventually he actually started to listen, and learned (or re-learned, actually, for when she ran out of new things to say, why, she just repeated what she already had) how her father had died a few years back, caught in the crossfire of some ninja dispute they never knew the reason for. Life had been good before his death, or at least, better, and was harder now. Hard on her mother, hard on Onji, her grandfather. They made do, and with the gold the pumpkin-man (as the girl called Tobi) gave them for taking care of Deidara, they were doing much better. Onji was able to buy the medicines that eased his joints, which allowed him to do more work, freeing Mama to take on more. (Not that Deidara necessarily saw the benefit in that, but it made the crazy girl happy, so what the hell.)

Not that she was ever _un-_happy. In fact, she was so bright and cheerful he wanted to strangle her. He had thought Tobi's childish irreverence was bad, but this was pure torture. But her guileless brown eyes, her frank, too-wide smile, her utter innocence---it was something he had never known as a child. It was alien, and appalling, and yet...grew on him.

She brought him things. Some strange, some annoying, some surprisingly beautiful, especially when she learned that he liked those best. She was a quick study, and could see the flicker of emotion in his guarded eyes. Her intuition surprised him, and he actually found himself---ugh!---looking forward to her little gifts. Not that they were much---a pretty feather she'd found, an army of stones and pebbles, a fallen bird's nest that stank as the eggs rotted. She spent enough time with him that she came to know his moods, and sometimes would slip out without saying a word to summon her mother or Onji when the pain grew too unbearable or his mood too dark. He brooded, and balked at how long it was taking for him to heal and strengthen. Frustrated by his inactivity, he was strangely lonely for more company than this limited trio, who lived entirely too simply for his insatiable mind.

As his body healed, the fevers and dreams grew less, and his hours of lucidity grew. The hours dragged then, the days folding one into another until the weeks and months blurred. Onji helped him to sit up one day, and little Natsumi clapped her hands in delight, dancing around the room. He wanted to kill her for what seemed such a frustratingly insignificant achievement. But the weariness and nausea that accompanied that first awkward movement surprised him. Weak---gods, he had never been so weak!

Stubbornly, he kept at it, eventually sitting up to one day stand swaying beside the bed. Onji brought him a cane---a surprisingly beautiful carving well-worn on the grip, one he said his own father had made. The cane helped Deidara stagger to the privy when he was still too weak to hold himself up. After a few weeks, he finally found his balance, and learned to walk on his own.

He had to learn---or re-learn---everything, and it was horrifyingly humbling, although none of his audience ever showed any disgust or impatience for what he saw as ridiculous mistakes. There was a simplicity, a stoic acceptance and love and kindness between the three people which Deidara disdained and yet intrigued him, for he was accepted into it without question. Such sheep-like acceptance disturbed him---life had taught him early that you were either a wolf or the sheep they preyed upon. And yet there was something there, in their quiet, sheep-like simplicity that he could not quite put his finger on. One that nagged at him until he finally gave up in pure frustration, for he could not understand it. Perhaps, was not able to.

It's what saved them, actually, in the end.

ooOOoo

He was not surprised when Tobi finally appeared one day to collect him. Slowly gaining strength and mastery over his new body, Deidara was starting to feel more like himself. He still tired easily, and was too thin and pale from being in bed for so long. But that would heal with better food and exercise, and he was growing restive and impatient with the isolated farm's restrictions. He'd tried to distract himself by getting the nauseatingly eager-to-please little girl to bring him some thick mud from the river-bottom. It was a poor substitute for the fine clay that was his usual medium, but his palms itched with the desire to create, and he could at least distract himself from how fucking bored he was with these people.

He was sitting desultorily on the sagging porch's steps, a faraway look in his blue eyes. Idly mushing the bird he had made in his hands, he rolled the sticky mud from one palm to the other without really thinking about much at all when a sudden flare of chakra on his right caused his eyes to narrow.

"Senpai! You're not dead!" Tobi gaily called, waving excitedly as he bound up the worn stone path.

Without bothering to look up, Deidara lobbed the mudball at the annoying pretender. Easily dodging the sticky missile, Tobi pouted as it landed behind him with a dull splat.

"Now, now, Deidara-senpai, that wasn't nice!"

"You can quit playing the clown, yeah," Deidara snapped, his eyes finally flicking up to meet the swirling orange mask that hid Tobi's expressions so effectively. His blue eyes were hard, flinty, like watered steel. "I've been wondering when you would finally show up."

"Deidara-sama?" Natsumi pushed the ratty bamboo curtain back, a tray in hand. Her brown eyes widened, and she froze in the doorway, for once silent. Her shoulders hunched, and she threw a frightened look at the blond-haired man who ignored her.

"Go back inside," Deidara said unnecessarily, his eyes never leaving Tobi, who had straightened, every line of his thin body expressing the smirk no one could see on his hidden face.

Natsumi fled.

"Awn. You've made a friend," Tobi gushed.

Deidara grunted.

"So grumpy, senpai!" Tobi chided, the irony heavy in his deep voice. "Really, it doesn't suit you."

"Shut up, yeah." Brushing the dried mud from his lap, Deidara stood up. "Can we go?"

"Impatient, too. You haven't changed all that much, have you, Deidara-san?"

Walking past his former partner, Deidara stopped when Tobi tsked.

"Wait a moment, Deidara-senpai. We aren't finished here."

Deidara tensed, the line of his shoulders tightening imperceptibly.

"We hardly have any further use for these people," Tobi began, his dark voice soft and cajoling. "And leaving witnesses...why, that would be foolish, wouldn't it, Deidara-san? It would be a shame if word of your resurrection got out, since everyone thinks you're dead. We could use your unexpected return to our benefit."

Deidara's fingers twitched, tongues hungrily licking at the mouths on his palms.

"I just happen to have some clay here, some of your favorite, from Iwagakure itself. Cost quite a bit to get hold of, but I know how you like to work with the finest. An artist of your skill---why, how degrading it must have been to be stuck here making mudballs for the amusement of peasant brats." Tobi, or whoever he really was, spoke with such purring assertion, trying to manipulate his vanity for his own ends.

The brat's face flashed before him, her too-wide smile and her constant babbling that had all but driven him insane. Tobi spoke the truth. It was stupid to leave witnesses alive, and these people---they were only simple sheep, sheep that wolves like he and Tobi would normally devour without thought. He saw the weariness in the woman's face, the wrinkled pain in the old man who had already lived too long. The girl laughed, a braying sound like a bilious donkey. A hideous laugh, really, when one thought about it. It would be so easy to just...

"Leave it," Deidara said shortly, and kept walking. After a long moment, Tobi followed.


End file.
